Sunday, March 27, 2011

message to community about community decline

The Wikimedia Board of Trustees just completed its two-day meeting this weekend in Berlin. We devoted the longest time to discussing declining trends in editing activity and our collective response to it. I encourage everyone to review Sue’s March update, and the editor trends study itself. It is a deeply important topic, and each report is only a few pages long.

The Board thinks this is the most significant challenge currently facing our movement. We would encourage the whole movement - the communities, wikiprojects, Chapters, Board, Foundation staff - to think about ways to meet this challenge. We know many contributors care about this and have worked on outreach and hospitality in past years. We are considering how we can help make such work more effective, and ask for suggestions from the community to this problem now and to invite discussion and suggestions.

2 comments:

The big thing I'd recommend is a broadening of focus: just getting more people to edit the same encyclopedia articles leads to diminishing returns, especially with a decade of accumulated articles in English and other major languages already having been built.

There's *SO MUCH* more we can be doing in building useful educational materials and creating spaces for people to learn, create, and share.